Manufacturing knowledge: Going from production of things to designing value in use

Abstract

A new vision in manufacturing is to develop product-service integrated value solutions. Today, few firms have fully realized this vision because they are not able to support the reasoning in the early stages of design. The purpose of this paper is to discuss engineers' cognitive challenge when replacing the core product rationale with value logic. The paper problematizes engineering design by dividing knowledge into the categories technically constructed (explicit) and socially constructed (tacit). In doing so, this study contributes the assumed effects of a perspective shift that could guide the development of computational tools.